Mother

We present this work in honor of Mother’s Day.

Ash falls on the roof
of my house.

I have cursed you enough
in the lines of my poems
& between them,
in the silences which fall
like ash-flakes
on the watertank
from a smog-bound sky.

I have cursed you
because I remember
the smell of Joy
on a sealskin coat
& because I feel
more abandoned than a baby seal
on an ice floe red
with it’s mother’s blood.

I have cursed you
as I walked & prayed
on a concrete terrace
high above the street
because whatever I pulled down
with my bruised hand
from the bruising sky,
whatever lovely plum
came to my mouth
you envied
& spat out.

Because you saw me in your image,
because you favored me,
you punished me.

It was only a form of you
my poems were seeking.
Neither of us knew.

For years
we lived together in a single skin.

We shared fur coats.
We hated each other
as the soul hates the body
for being weak,
as the mind hates the stomach
for needing food,
as one lover hates the other.

I kicked
in the pouch of your theories
like a baby kangaroo.

I believed you
on Marx, on Darwin,
on Tolstoy & Shaw.
I said I loved Pushkin
(you loved him).
I vowed Monet
was better than Bosch.

Who cared?

I would have said nonsense
to please you
& frequently did.

This took the form,
of course,
of fighting you.

We fought so gorgeously!

We fought like one boxer
& his punching bag.
We fought like mismatched twins.
We fought like the secret sharer
& his shade.

Now we’re apart.
Time doesn’t heal
the baby to the womb.
Separateness is real
& keeps on growing.

One by one the mothers
drop away,
the lovers leave,
the babies outgrow clothes.

Some get insomnia –
the poet’s disease –
& sit up nights
nursing
at the nipples
of their pens.

I have made hot milk
& kissed you where you are.
I have cursed my curses.
I have cleared the air.
& now I sit here writing,
breathing you.

Roman Holiday

In Rome at the New Year it is the custom to throw old things into the street.

Rome rattles and shakes
like a runaway breakdown truck.
All over Rome and round about
the New Year’s coming in!

Like Mills bombs, bottles
dropped from windowsills.
crash all over the place,
and what price that tough
shoving a bathtub onto a balcony?

Up on the Piazza di Spagna,
spinning like a flying saucer,
a husband is flung from his nuptial bed:
he’s obsolete and all but dead!

They’ve cornered a naked man in a bar,
‘Damn you squares!’, he bawls,
‘I need a change of suit:
last year’s is out of date’.

Dear town, we shall flounder and drown
In your cast-offs and metamorphoses;
your ancient asphalted roadways
gleam like the sloughed skins of pythons.
All the times you have shuffled them off,
but the speedometers show they’re still too slow
for Roman girls on Vespas!
So what next do you have in store for us?

The human race with roars and guffaws
is ridding itself of its rubbish,
do we all need overhauls?
Like Time itself we approach our hour

and stand, forgetting petty chores,
fully absorbed now by the future.
Do we regret what we’re discarding?
A reindeer’s dam, just after fawning,
looks loving and a little overcome.

Maybe the New Year will be rough,
with a few good days for flying in it?
Don’t worry: it won’t be the end of the world
– and the more fun we’ll have saying goodbye to it.

We fly through the air like apples off branches.
This fuss is already rather a bore,
though later, at least, I have something to live for:
– towards the middle of the windy day,
in her lopsided winter villa she’ll say
(once she’s gallopped through that thriller)
that she’s cold when I’m not with her,
she’s cold without me is what she’ll say…

And past other worlds
into darkness, deadpan as a croupier,
our pale planet whirls –
cooped in its shell like an embryo bird.
It’s hatching out now, look!
What to become? A warbler?
Or a black thing, a baby rook
blasted off the wing by atomic warheads?

I only hope the weather keeps fine
for all these darling creatures…
Over Rome – and all the world what’s more –
the New Year’s coming in…
…with tangerines and amorous passes,
and right till dawn the women’s bodies
– like electric bulbs in lampshades –
glowing through their dresses.

Closing Statement

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine
Moroccan
1941 – 1995

once the poem satiates itself on the ivory honey of tarantulas
& the albumen of a bogus star
exploding hopelessly under the coke of my assemblies
once the berbers post-total-fantasia
fling what calabashes they have into the void of rifles
a conspiracy of eagles hatched by the true figure
of discovery & joy
will display my humid fever like april is
milky from almond & torrent

once the widowers stir the ashy heart of the minaret
once the children embrace scorpions by the hook
the prose of exile will have tempered such that it suffices
to snip its umbilical cord from this anxiety of mine
& sever the oars slapping the dorsal spine of my fatigue
to its delirious point

I’m laying you out
little nostalgia-worlds
in the shipwrecking gaze of the dead
still fit
to recite from the chapters of audacious crime
the arachnids’ closing statement

I Loved You Once

In honor of the Russian holiday, Victory Day, we present this work by Russia’s most legendary poet.

I loved you once: perhaps that love has yet
To die down thoroughly within my soul;
But let it not dismay you any longer;
I have no wish to cause you any sorrow.
I loved you wordlessly, without a hope,
By shyness tortured, or by jealousy.
I loved you with such tenderness and candor
And pray God grants you to be loved that way again.

The Museum

A clamor, in the distance. A crowd running under the rain beating
down, between the canvases the sea wind set clattering.

A man passes crying something. What is he saying? What he
knows! What he has seen! I make out his words. Ah, I almost
understand!

I took refuge in a museum. Outside the great wind mixed with
water reigns alone from now on, shaking the glass panes.

In each painting, I think, it’s as if God were giving up on finishing
the world.

Address

“Where is the friend’s house?” asked the horseman just at dawn.
The Heavens paused.
A wayfarer took the bright branch from his lips,
conferred it on the darkness of the sands,
pointed with his finger to a poplar tree and said,
“Just before that tree
there is a garden path greener than God’s dreams.
In it there is love as wide as the blue wings of true friendship.
You go on to the end of the path that takes up again
just beyond maturity,
then turn toward the flower of loneliness.
Two steps before the flower,
stop at the eternal fountain of earthly myth.
There a transparent terror will seize you,
and in the sincerity of the streaming heavens
you will hear a rustling.
High up in a pine tree,
you will see a child
who will lift a chick out of a nest of light.
Ask him,
‘Where is the friend’s house?’”

Oh Egypt

In honor of the first day of Ramadan, we present this work by one of Egypt’s great Muslim poets.

Mahmoud Samy El Baroudi
Egyptian
1839 – 1904

Oh Egypt, may your shadow be extended
and your soil be drenched
with the pure water of the Nile.
you are the sanctuary of my people
and the branching place of my family,
the playground of my age-mate
and the race course of my horses.
A country in which youth took off
the amulet of my childhood and
hung the scabbard of my sword on my shoulder .
I felt behind in it noble kinsmen
and neighbors whose image
comes back to me every morning.
I felt the sweetness of life after their
departure and said farewell to the soft flower of youth.

To a Laborer

In honor of Cinco de Mayo, we present this work by one of Mexico’s great poets.

Ruin and rot their raging rule have rolled
Rebellions, o’er the glories of thy dead!
Recall not regal dreams of carnage red,
Revels and triumphs, routs and robes of gold,

Revert no vain regret on splendors fled;
Rude, rushing time, with rigid, ruthless cold,
Ravishing, reckless, rusts thy royal head;
Ravages sanctuaries once rose-souled.

Rest! in the rank recesses of each dome
Rest! oh grand town revered, a spirit-home
Ready wilt find when worlds have passed away,
Regions of air and odorous realms of sky.
Restored in spheres of everlasting day,
Rome thou shalt never know what ‘tis to die!